gardening, poetry, New England

Post navigation

Oulipost, Day 23 – Inventory

Select text from your source paper, and collate it into the component parts of speech (nuns, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, etc.). Bonus points for creative presentation of these lists.
I chose a sentence from each of four sections of the Boston Globe for inventory. Reporters have learned their lessons well; there were precious few adverbs! I’m presenting them first in a chart which is a list horizontally, then a sentence if read vertically. With the leftover words, I assembled a few sentences. I changed plurality as needed, but otherwise the words are intact. It’s all pretty much nonsense sentences, but this was an interesting method of remixing the words. The one unanticipated aspect of this exercise is that words may represent different parts of speech, depending on how they are used. When I inventoried the words in these sentences, I categorized them based on their uses therein, but when presenting them in new sentences, they may take on new roles. See how other Ouliposters juggled this constraint at the Found Poetry Review.